Japan

Living in another country can be inconvenient in many ways and its often the ones you least expect that end up annoying you the most. I generally try not to be one of those people that look at other countries as weird or wrong. I avoid making the assumption that the way I’m used to things being done in my home country is the ‘right way’ or the way things should be done. That said after much consideration I have come to the unfortunate conclusion that the Japanese consumption tax system is bloody stupid.

Its not that I have a problem with taxes themselves consumption tax or otherwise. Its more the way the stores display prices and the way it seems to be calculated. For those of you either not living in Japan or who just aren’t very observant consumption tax in Japan is added to the price displayed rather than already being calculated into it. This seems pointless in several ways as firstly it results in lots of uneven and non-rounded prices leading to more small change but also because it makes calculating what you need to pay slightly more difficult. It would be a different matter if there were some people that didn’t need to pay this tax even if they were only a small minority. For example in the UK many office stationary, wholesale and hardware catalogues wont include VAT (British consumption tax) in the price but will list it separately. This makes sense as many of the consumers will be companies who potentially don’t need to pay the tax or will collect it from a secondary customer when they resell the product. When buying a bottle of coke in a Japanese convenience store though you will have to pay the tax regardless of your circumstances. So why then do all the stores insist on listing the prices as the non tax prices with the actual price either not displayed or displayed in tiny writing below the non-tax price. I’m fairly sure there isn’t a law saying they have to display it this way as many other stores and businesses don’t.

There are a whole host of problems I have with this odd way of displaying consumption tax. The first is simply the convenience for the consumer. I like to be able to know how much I’m going to need to pay before going to the till and this makes it more difficult to calculate in my head. Also many tills have the annoying habit of displaying the non tax price total first despite this being a totally irrelevant number that doesn’t need to be displayed. The actually total price only appears after the cashier pushes another button something they don’t always do right away. As a result I’ve had several embarrassing situations where I have put down the amount the till display shows only for the cashier to then push another button changing the price and looking at me like I’m an idiot. It would be annoying but manageable if every shop was the same but some actually display the correct price which leads to the equally embarrassing situation of me standing there doing nothing after the price has been totalled and the clerk once again thinking I’m an idiot for not paying fast enough.

Beyond this minor annoyance thought I have several larger reasons for disliking this system. First of all I think its bad from a societal prospective as it doesn’t give businesses an incentive to keep after tax prices the same after a tax rise. What I man by this is that when tax goes up in the UK prices for the consumer often don’t as the big businesses don’t want to risk losing businesses by raising prices if their competitors might not. As such big supermarkets and chain stores will often keep prices the same and take a small hit to their profits rather than pass tax rises on to the customer. When the tax rise from five to eight percent happened in Japan all the prices actually went up which hit overall consumption and reduced the amount of things people bought which could potentially lead to the government getting less tax overall despite the higher percentage tax.

The aim of a tax system is to get the money needed to run society with as little inconvenience as possible for the common people or at least it should be. By allowing businesses to display pre-tax prices they have taken away any incentive these businesses have to smooth the transaction or reduce their prices to keep the overall price the same.

The final reason I don’t like this way of displaying tax is that I suspect its actually leading to some form of over or underpayment of tax due to the need to have the price be a whole number. While on an individual transaction this is a meaninglessly small amount for a large business making millions of transactions each month is could result to a huge discrepancy is what tax should be paid and what is actually ending up in government hands.

Think of it this way, for a simple price like ¥ 100 it becomes ¥108. No problem but for a price like ¥99 it should be ¥106.92 (99+7.92) which is clearly unusable as you cant take payment of a fractional yen. As such the business needs to round the number and as it’s so close to being ¥107 they tend to round up. This means that on a great number of transactions the individual is actually being overtaxed by a tiny amount. The opposite will also happen with some prices being closer to the lower number so being rounded down. Its likely that overall the two differences mostly even out but there is still likely to be a difference. So either the business have overtaxed people overall or under taxed them. What happens with that difference? Does the business pass on the over collected tax to the government or do they keep it for themselves. If the tax has overall been slightly under-collected due to rounding does the government simply get less money or does it come out the businesses pocket. They is likely a very clever and intricate bureaucratic accounting system that resolves this problem but whatever overly complex system they’ve created isn’t really needed as they could have set the consumer price first then taken 8% of it leading the the non whole number being on the price before tax rather than the final price. As businesses and governments dealing with accounts can account for partial yen this would entirely remove the problem.

But wait. It gets even better from the societal prospective as changing to this system would see the government collect more tax from the same consumer price. If a product is to be sold at ¥108 then the tax on it would be ¥8.64 which is more than it is now. With the example above of the rounded up price to ¥107 it would instead become ¥8.56 in tax making a pre-tax price for the business of ¥98.44. The business would have their prices being the fractional ones rather than any rounding being involved. There’s no need for a business to have whole number pre tax prices as that’s not what they are going to collect from the consumer. If the business decides that it absolutely needs to get at least ¥99 from this sale then they can put the consumer price up to ¥108 instead and can deal with the consumer knowing that they have raised their prices to make a bigger profit rather than hiding behind the excuse of consumption tax. Best of all those cases mentioned earlier of underpaid tax would also be fixed by this change.

Businesses would get other advantages to compensate them for the slight increase they may end up paying. For example this change would allow businesses to set more rounded prices if they wished likely without the consumer complaining. Having a price of ¥108 is actually a bit odd. Why not use ¥105 or ¥110. Either price would be preferred by the consumer as they wouldn’t end up with one yen coins as change. It would also allow the Business to keep less one yen coins and reduce the number of smaller coins in their float. This would reduce the amount of work for businesses banking services which would hopefully lead to a reduction in costs which could be passed on to the business customers. Continue this line of thought to its logical conclusion across society and you could see less use of one yen coins overall which could lead to a reduction in the number that need to be minted each year. Given that small denominations often cost more to mint than their face value this would lead to another saving for the government and therefore the taxpayer.

I can see no major disadvantage of this system for either the government or the consumer. Ever for businesses I can see very little disadvantages as in many cases it will all even out and they will still end up with the same prices and tax. The difference is simply that the fractional yen end up being on the side of people who are actually able to deal with fractional yen.

While my academic and previous employment background is in accounting and tax I don’t claim to be an expert in the subject. If you can see a reason for the current system or a better way to resolve the problem please comment below.

This is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. When with a group of friends half of whom are likely to be American the group as a whole seems to be expected to work in dollars. I find this both strange and annoying for several reasons none of which actually have to do with it not being my currency.

Firstly we are people who live in Japan. We work in Japan, pay rent in Japan and spend in Japan. Other currencies simply aren’t relevant to us anymore except when sending money home. It may still be useful to know the up to date exchange rate for the sake of knowing how much you can bring when you go home but day to day it doesn’t really matter.

“Ahhh,” you say “but how will we know if things are cheap or expensive if we don’t convert it at least in our heads.”

Well the fact is that converting amounts generally isn’t the best way to work out value.Firstly exchange rates are always changing so something you buy one day and think is cheap may seem expensive a few weeks later. Has its value changed? Has the amount in yen that you pay changed? Has the proportion of your disposable income that the thing cost changed? The answer to all of these is no and yet many people will change their ideas of what is affordable based on foreign currencies which don’t actually matter while you’re living here.

A better way to understand how much something is worth is to look at how many hours you are working to pay for it. You can use you gross pay as a quick guide or if you want you can work out you hourly net pay. An even better system is to work out your hourly desposable income or total disposable income. Any of these methods give you a much better way to assign values to things you are buying in a new country.

Many Americans when I tell them about this pet peeve will ask what difference it makes. A dollar as about 100 yen so surely saying g dollars when everyone knows what they mean isn’t a real problem. Well I think it is. It’s a bad habit to get into when you are going to need to use yen when speaking to Japanese people. In the same way you should drop romanji for hiragana as soon as possible to get more familiar with the new writing system there is no point in using your old currency when doing so will make your ability to deal with yen slower.

The main argument against using dollars though is that one dollar is not one hundred yen.In the last twelve months the dollar has ranged from ¥99 to ¥118 it’s currently at about ¥114. During the last year it was far more likely that one dollar was 10-15% different from one hundred yen. So when someone says “$100 is far to expensive.” They don’t realise that the ten thousand yen they are talking about is actually about eighty seven dollars.

Even over longer periods like five years the dollar is rarely actually one hundred yen. In the last five years it’s ranged from ¥77 to ¥125 or dollar.during that time it was within 10% of one hundred yen to the dollar less than a third of it. Even when it was within 10% there is a major difference between ninety yen and one hundred and ten yen to the dollar.

This tendancy to use dollars to mean yen is not only a bad habit to get into when adapting to a new culture but it also leads to bad financial decision making which could hurt you. It’s not all difficult to learn a new currency and generally only takes a few weeks when you start to actually use it instead of pretending you are using dollars.

So I had a couple of embarrassing things happen on the way to work today. I don’t want want to to imagine something truly mortifying but nearly a bit uncomfortable. I’m not sure if you would feel the same way about these things. Maybe it’s just me and I’m some oversensitive freak but I don’t think so.

The first thing that happened was that I went to Macdonald’s for lunch (I know… Both unhealthy and a wasted opportunity to experience Japanese culture but I was in a rush) and when I got to the counter I realised I didn’t have any money in my wallet.

I must have spent my last thousand yen on food the night before and hadn’t been to the ATM. I realised as I was ordering b so had to say sorry and rush off. At least it wasn’t later as that would have been worse. While this was mildly embarrassing it’s the ki d of thing that occasional happens and I resolved to not let it bother me.

So now being g aware that I had no money and still needing g to buy lunch I headed to the ATM which led to my second embarrassment.

When I arrived at the ATMs it was at the same time as a Japanese businessman who was just ahead of me. There was already a women waiting to use a machine so we queued up behind her. The order being the women then the businessman then me. I noticed that one of the ATMs was actually free and had been since before we got there but for some reason the women was going to it. The businessman had also clearly noticed this and shifted around uncertainly. When another machine became avaliable the women went to use it. The businessman continued to wait as the women had and didn’t use the free machine. It’s likely he had assumed it was out of order as I had due to the women’s actions.

Another machine become free and the businessman takes it. At this point I’m at the front of the queue. Should I go for the free but potentially out of order machine or just wait on the assumption that the people before me had known what they were doing.

Before I could decide a big group came in together and joined the queue behind me. I could tell that they were giving me weird looks. ‘ why isn’t the tall foreigner using the machine? Is it broken?’ but they wait just as I had. When I go up to a machine the women behind me goes to the other free machine which it seems was working the entire time.

I left with the feeling that I’d done something stupid or embarrassing despite doing the same thing as the two people before me. I felt judged even though I knew most of those people didn’t really care and likely forgot in seconds. It wasn’t a major embarrassment or anything too upsetting but it did make me feel really awkward and stupid.

So what do you think? Would you have done the same and if you had would it have been embarrassing. I know there are some people that are unfazed by anything but I’m not one of them. How about you?

A BBC 3 reporter called Stacey Dooley was held by Japanese police while filming her documentary on the sexual exploitation of children in Japan. She was filming in an area called JK alley in Akihibara, Tokyo, when she was approached by men who told her to stop recording. When she refused to (given that it was a public street) the men got the police involved who detailed the reporter and her crew. These men were most likely pimps or some sort of security and yet the police chose their side over the foreigners filming on a public street.Supossedly both the men and the police asked for the footage to be deleted and she was held for refusing to comply.

The film crew was only held for about two hours so it was likely done more to keep the peace and provide a warning more than anything else. Remember than in Japan ‘The nail that sticks out gets hammered down’. Also if you are seen as causing inconvenience or conflict even if you are in the right you will generally be blames. The police may have thought they were doing the right thing by preventing the situation from escalating if the security took matters into their own hands. Then again they may have been paid or have some other sort of agreement. There have long been rumours that the Japanese police intentionally ignore domestically produced meth with the understanding that criminal groups wont bring in drugs like heroin and cocain.I’m not sure how true those rumours are but you could see something similar happening here. The police agree to stop people making trouble if the pimps agree to keep violence and visible problems to a minimum.

The police only held the reporter for two hours which is insanely quick for the japanese police. There is a great blog by a foreigner who was accused of stealing a bike and he was dragged back to the police station several times with specialists coming in from Tokyo to speak with him. Another recent story I head was of an english teacher being detained for two weeks without the police telling his company or family. The company ended up filing a missing persons report because they didn’t know where he was. The police in Japan can hold you for 23 days without charge.

The documentary itself seems well made although is aimed at a very general audience. If you already know a bit about Japan many of the things looked at won’t be new to you. also as it’s quite generally it doesn’t get too far into related issues in japan or how this links to sexual exploitation around the world. If you want a more in-depth look at these issues there are plenty of articles, blogs, books and interviews that have more detail. That said this is a good documentary given its intended audience.

A lot of the things like JK (joshi kosei-high school girls) likely won’t really new to you. JK alley where the reporter was detained is actually fairly well-known. It’s an area in Akihibara where girls stand on the street and offer various services to men willing to pay for them. These services generally aren’t openly sold as being straight up sex although if enough money is offered in the right way it can most likely lead to that. It’s often things like the girls saying particular things, holding hands and offering lap pillows. One of the most common is simply a long walk with the girl. Of course the assumption is that the walk will end at a love hotel.There are all sorts of services related to the JK industry such as massage parlours with happy endings and websites which arrange for long-term paid girlfriend arrangements between young girls and older men. One of the few raids the police actually bothered to do was of a business where men paid to watch underage girls fold paper cranes while showing their underwear.

The JK industry is so large, well established and accepted by those in positions of power that there is very little real will to do anything about it. The documentary was created to see what effect the 2014 law banning child pornography has had but almost from day one people said it wasn’t going to make a difference. A law only changes things if there is a will to actually act on it and as long as nothing is too public them the police seem to have very little will to act.

The JK industry itself has links to the Yakuza and to seemingly mainstream entertainment like AKB48. This is an industry so entrenched that all past attempts to remove it have failed. It often seems like people have given up on really stopping it or making these things illegal. Instead the focus of charities and pressure groups seem to be on either discouraging girls from getting involved or helping them escape. I can’t blame these groups for trying to do the best they can with what they’ve got but at times it feels a bit like blaming the victims.

The BBC documentary is called Young sex for sale in Japan and can be found here on BBC iPlayer but is only available if you are in the UK.

I very recently had my three-year anniversary in Japan. It’s always great to hit another milestone but this particular milestone came with a fairly stressful addition. Three years is the length of time commonly given for a working visa so as the end of my third year approached I started getting ready for the renewal process.

My company was really great about giving me the paperwork early and all of their parts were correctly filled out. There were some point in the document that referred to notes on the opposite side that weren’t actually there. I’m unsure if my company printed copies out themselves so didn’t have the notes or if it was actually something done by the immigration office. Either way while the missing notes caused me a bit of concern it wasn’t much of a problem.

You can submit a request to extend your visa up to three months in advance. Due to how far away the office was and several things I wanted to get clarified i submitted mine a bit over two months before. That shouldn’t have been a problem though as the average is only about 4 weeks. The winter vacation was potentially a bit of an issue as the office will have been closed over new year still two months should be plenty of time.

So I submitted my paperwork in person and waited. About a month later during the winter holiday I got a surprise letter saying that they needed me to fill in a different form and provide copies of all my contracts for my current company. As I’d changed jobs during my visa they required more information and documents but neither I nor my company had known about this. I had thought that everything had ben sorted out with the forms I filled in at the time when i changed jobs but now they wanted more.

At this point the company i worked for was closed so I couldn’t ask for any advise so I made the trip to the immigration office with the new form filled out and copies of all my contracts or so I thought. It turns out that in my rush to get things done I had missed a contract for a training period when I first changed job. This usually wouldn’t be much of a problem as it covered a very short period but the man at the office said i should go and get it anyway.

At this point I still wasn’t too worried although I did find it a bit annoying having something like this hanging over my head. So rather than argue that a small employment gap was actually acceptable on a working visa I decided to head home for the day and get it sorted tomorrow. I even said to the man “OK I’ll come back tomorrow then.”

So the next morning I force myself out of my warm bed, drag myself across the city to the immigration office and find to my dismay that everything was closed. The day before had been the last day before the office closed for the holidays and the man I’d spoken to yesterday hadn’t seen the need to say anything. This left me unable to do anything for almost a week. Great way to spend new year.

Anyway the week passes and the office is open again. On the first day I rush down there to arrive the second it opens and manage to submit my new form and photocopies of all my contracts fairly quickly. Happy with myself I thought my problems were over.

Two more weeks pass and I’ve only got two more weeks before my visa expires. So when I open my mailbox one day to find an envelope from the immigration office I’m overjoyed. Until I opened it anyway. It was the same request for contracts and another form which I had just submitted two weeks before.

Another trip across the city to their office. I made it clear I had submitted the form before. I gave the dates and details which were noted down by the girl behind the counter who insisted that she’d find out what had happened. I asked if she could check the progress of my application something she claimed wasn’t possible. I know she was lying because when I went back later other staff were able to quickly and easily check my application.

So I continued to wait. I waited and visited the office every time I had a morning off to check on its progress. Still no visa. The day of my visa expiration comes with no more information or progress.

The day after my visa expired I made yet another trip to their office doing my best not to stand out to the police on my way. Legally speaking even though my visa had expired I was still allowed to stay as my application was still being processed. You get up to two months after the expiration for them to finish processing it. That said I couldn’t be sure that the police would know about things like that. If I got asked for my id and it looked expired I couldn’t be sure that the police officers weren’t going to arrest me as an easy way to fill their arrest quota.I’ve never actually been stopped by the police the entire time I’ve been here but you can guarantee that if there’s one day you are likely to get stopped it’s the day after your visa expires.

So I went to the office again ready to play hell with them about it not being done and demand answers. I know this is just about the worse thing you can do in Japan and is likely to cause even more problems but I was angry. So when I got up to the counter I demanded to know when my visa would be done. The women there just said “chotto matte,” and wandered off.

I was left a bit unsure how to respond to what seemed like sure a casual brush off of my situation but before I could decide she was back with a file in her hands. The file was my completed and approved application. Everything done and no further problems. Apparently the notification post card to tell me to collect it had just been sent out that morning. A quick trip to the Kombini to get the payment stamp and a little while waiting at another window to collect the finished product and I was done.

Finally an end to my two month visa nightmare and a weight off my mind.

I write this post not to complain about my own experience which was most likely an isolated incident. Nor do I want to rant about the ridiculous and wasteful Japanese civil service that still does everything on paper in triplicate with payment stamps rather than going electronic. No neither of these are the reason for my post. I write this post for one reason. To tell everyone who needs to do a visa renewal to do it early. Two months should have been plenty of time but it’s not worth the stress when things go wrong.

You can submit up to three months in advance. I recommend talking to your company and doing all the paperwork before that. Forward date it to exactly one day after the three-month mark. Then be there at 8:30 before they open to make sure you are the first one in. It may sound like a hassle but if you can save yourself the months of having it hanging over your head by getting it in earlier and getting help the second a problem presents itself then you will save yourself a lot of trouble.

Japan seems to have a strange relationship with snacks. They love snacks and enjoy eating them but at the same time due to the importance of appearance (both physically and in terms of personality) they wont actually eat that many. This is no doubt much healthier than the western attitude and leads to lower levels of obesity but at the same time is a small example of the levels of conformity expected in all aspects of an individual’s life.

My post today isn’t really about conformity, health or obesity. I’ll save the conformity versus the individual right to self-expression debate for another day. For this post I want to talk about the actual snacks themselves and why there are so many odd flavours and short-lived products especially in a country that consumes far lower levels of sugar than many western countries.

The popular Takenoko no sato also gets in on the game with its constant changes.

When you live in Japan you’ll notice a steady flow of new flavors and products many of which are seasonal or limited edition. From the insane number of different Kit Kat flavours to the strangely colored (black and green) Doritos there’s always some new variation that people are talking about or insisting that you have to try. If these new variations are so great why is it that so few are on the shelves for more than a few weeks?

Many seasonal snacks will be the more traditional ones which rely on a particular crop or fruit. While it would be easy to import or store the needed ingredients people want their traditional snacks to be made with local ingredients. there’s also a major cultural element to having these treats at a particular time of year. So I can understand why these would be limited to particular times.

One of almost a hundred Pringles flavors I’ve spotted in the last three years.

It’s a bit more difficult to understand the mass-produced seasonal products or the often crazy limited edition flavors. In many other countries these kinds of products are released as a test run and as a way to make a short-term profit boost. When companies in the west release a limited time product they are hoping it will be popular enough to continue but if it isn’t they still get the short-term advantage of more people talking about and buying their products.Kit Kat chunky and several other popular western snacks started this way.

In japan though it seems to be common to constantly release new special flavors and I’ve yet to see any that become permanent. I suppose green tea flavored Kit Kats are pretty much a permanent fixture now in some stores but there seem to be very few others.

What I mean is that Japan seems to release ten times as many special edition snacks as the UK but continues far less. In the UK we had products like Whisper gold and Whisper mint which both started as limited edition products.

I don’t really have numbers to back this up it’s just my impression. Almost every snack company in Japan seems to release a near constant stream of new flours and seems to plan from the beginning to not continue them regardless of how popular they are. I find it a bit disappointing as some of the best (and worst) snacks I’ve tried in Japan have been limited edition and were gone after a few weeks.

Many of the products were fairly strange or pointless but others were good. Most companies also seem to have seasonal special products which they only sell for a short time but do it every year like clockwork. This often leads to strawberry, green tea, sweet potato and sakura flavoured products being all that’s in the stores at some times of year.

I suppose it could be like seeing the Coca Cola commercial and the special bottles being a sign of Christmas. For me the coke commercial was one of those things that actually made it feel christmassy. Given how important the seasons are in japan these snacks could have the same effect that actually seeing the cherry blossoms does for some people. If you live in a built up area and travel the same route to work or school every day it quite possible that you might not see sakura all that much so seeing products might be what kick starts that spring feeling.

Yet more Kit Kats now with more booze.

I suspect that a big part of what makes these things so popular is that the japanese just like new things.The most popular brand in japan isn’t Gucci or Armani, Its new. People are so obsessed with having new houses that it’s actually common for people to buy a ten or fifteen year old house (that even in an earthquake prone country won’t be half way through its life yet) and knock it down to build a near identical one of the same size. I strongly suspect that Japans economy would be in an even worse state if they didn’t have this wasteful habit of throwing away or destroying things which still have years of potential use.

So if you find a snack your like or something that you really want to share with people back home make sure to get it quick and stock up as its unlikely to be around for very long.

I search for things about Japan a lot. Living in Japan, Japan news, how to learn Japanese ect ect. I get a huge amount of information that I need from the internet and it tends to be my first point of call when I need to know something. Despite all my time looking things up about Japan I’ve rarely had reason to actually put Japan by itself into a search engine. I usually look for more specific information and don’t want to wade though a bunch of general pages to find what I need. So I was a bit surprised when my first ever general search for Japan turned up the CIA as the fifth result on Google.co.jp .

Surely I thought there has to be a mistake. Ignoring entirely that the CIA isn’t exactly renowned for their popular and informative website I just couldn’t understand how it could be near the top of a Google search. Surely there was something more regularly updated, more popular and with more link backs which should have been more likely to come on the first page.If Google is trying to give Its users detailed and relevent sites about Japan its algorithms should be returning blogs, businesses and organisations likely to appeal to the type of person that would search for Japan.

The other top links all made sense although I was surprised that more popular blogs like Gaijinpot didn’t make it onto the top page. The results above the CIA were:

I suppose a search for just Japan is likely focused on statistics and factual information rather than other types of writing but this still seems strange to me. The factors search engines consider are things like popularity, history of the site, update regularity and back linking. I just can’t see the dry, boring and very limited statistical information of the CIA website beating all other sites on those criteria. Even if it does the aim of search algorithms is to return the results the user are likely to want. Outside of school children doing very general school reports who exactly do they envision wanting this information when they search for Japan.

The site itself is little more than dry facts about population, land mass and some carefully worded history. It’s clear that the site is kept up to date as it makes mention of relatively recent things like the current Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the Fukushima earthquake but it still likely isn’t updated anywhere near as often as many other sites.

I don’t really have any particular point for this post. I’m just curious about how a CIA page rather than any of the millions of other far more informative pages out there ended up with such a prestigious place on Google.

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